Timothy of the Cay Read Free Page B

sorry..." My face was wet with her tears.
    Yet I felt uncomfortable in her arms. I didn't want her to be sorry for me. Timothy had never taken pity on me, and there were times when I'd thought I deserved it. But I learned from him that pity is often a deadly enemy.
    It had been my mother's decision that we leave Curaçao to go back to our regular home in Virginia and what she thought was safety. But I'd long ago stopped blaming her for what happened.
    As Timothy once said, "She started dis turrible wahr, eh, young bahss?" No, she hadn't started World War II, I knew. She was just frightened of it and wanted to flee once the U-boat attacks began.
    "How did they find you?" my father wanted to know.
    "Smoke from my fire pile was spotted by an aircraft working with the destroyer." It would take days to tell them everything that had happened on the raft and the cay.
    First, I wanted to hear what happened to my mother after the torpedo hit, without warning, at three A.M. , the darkest part of the night.
    I remember that when I came up on deck with her the whole after part of the ship was on fire. Everything was red against the moonless night. There was a lot of fright and yelling. Then we were told to climb into the lifeboat so that it could be launched. As it was being lowered, the bow tilted sharply down, and we were thrown into the water.
    My mother said, "I swam around trying to find you but you'd floated away. Then a sailor grabbed me and towed me back toward the lifeboat."
    They'd gotten it into the water, after all.
    "I fought him, Phillip. I didn't want to get into that boat without you. Then he slapped me and someone lifted me up—" Her voice broke again. "I thought you'd drowned and it was my fault, my fault..."
    She said they had to hold her in the lifeboat to keep her from jumping overboard.
    It was hard for me to imagine my mother jumping overboard and swimming off alone to find me. Yet I knew she was being truthful. She loved me, I also knew, though she seldom said so. People change in emergencies, Timothy taught me.
    "We tacked back and forth all that day and the next one, going toward land. There wasn't much breeze. I thought of nothing but you and didn't care whether I lived or died..."
    Then a tanker bound for Aruba, another of the Dutch islands, came along, and soon all the survivors of the
Hato
—except three—were safe.
    "I told the tanker captain that you were in the water and had disappeared. I knew you had a life jacket and might still be alive. There were sharks..."
    She stopped, voice fading.
    "The captain then sent a message to the navy telling them the ship was sunk and that he'd picked up survivors," my father said evenly. He added, "I had no idea the
Hato
had gone down until that message was relayed."
    He had a copy of it at home. He read it to me later:
    Â 
PLS ADVISE PHILLIP ENRIGHT CARE CURACAOSCHE PETROLEUM MAATSCHAPPIJ SS HATO SUNK APPROXIMATELY 76 WEST 12 NORTH 6 APRIL X MRS. ENRIGHT SURVIVED IN GOOD CONDITION X IS EN ROUTE ARUBA X SON PHILLIP ENRIGHT BELIEVED MISSING X
    Â 
    He said he learned that the Dutch Navy had sent out a search plane from Curaçao and the American Navy sent three out of Coco Solo, here in Panama. Not even an oil slick was sighted. He had a pilot friend and they took off in a light plane and looked for me, too. They almost ran out of gas and had to land in Barranquilla, Colombia.
    By that time, Timothy, Stew Cat, and I had drifted slowly northwest on our eight square feet of wood and barrels, toward the cays off Nicaragua.
    "Tell us what happened on the raft, Phillip," my father said.

4. Back o'All
    OCTOBER 1884 —Hannah Gumbs was out behind the thatch-roofed shanty, using a long-handled wooden paddle to lift up steaming, dripping clothes. Charcoal from nearby Porto Rico glowed beneath the large cast-iron tub. Lye water boiled. Fumes rose from it and lodged in the light, warm rain, clearing nostrils in one whiff. Back o' All smelled of poverty, rain